Ugh! I hate intractable yak shaving problems. Today’s was just pitiful. Luckily I can dodge most of them, but there is always one that has my name on it…

So today I had the classic Yak Shaving problem. I encounter about one intractable Yak per week that just makes me blow my top and vent steam for about 10 minutes. My cats are beginning to recognise this behaviour pattern and hide under the couch until it passes.

My room-mate, Sharan, has a piece of homework she wants help with.

So Sharan starts up Visual Studio on her laptop and Visual Assist performs a scan of the local network and finds that the registration key it is installed with is already in use on my workstation in the other room and refuses to start. I have multiple Visual Assist keys so it must be that she inadvertently installed a key that was already in use.

So my room-mate asks me what the problem is and I tell her, and that she should use another key and it’s stored in the archive on the file server.

When she looks there is only one key listed there. I remember I put the newly purchased keys on the company wiki so I tell her to look there.

But she doesn’t have an account to the company intranet but she does have access to the company file server. So I have to add her details to the intranet server. This requires me to log in to the intranet.

But I’m logging in from my laptop which I just re-installed the OS on and I can’t remember my intranet password. I try all of my default passwords but none seem to work.

So I have to log in to the intranet server via windows terminal services to recover my intranet password before I can add my room-mate’s details to the intranet server.

But the intranet server is reporting that no terminal server client access licenses are available.

So I have to physically go to the intranet server and log in as the administrator to find out why the terminal server licence manager isn’t issuing licenses properly.

Which requires me to log on to MSDN on Microsoft’s website to read a help file, but that username & password are stored in the backup on the file server which I haven’t restored to my laptop yet.

But the information is also contained in the MSDN on CD.

But I don’t have the complete library installed.

So I have to install that.

But first I have to locate the proper disc in the MSDN box.

So I install the proper MSDN Library disc and I read the help file and log in to the file server at the console to flip the bit that switches on the Terminal License Server that lets me return to my workstation to log in via Remote Terminal to reset my intranet password to something I can remember to let me log in to the intranet to add Sharan’s details to the intranet to let her access the company wiki to retrieve another Visual Assist license key to enable her to do her homework.

I’m reminded of the nursery song “There was an old woman who swallowed a fly…”

Subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter to stay up to date!